Make your eating habits healthier by reading the contents label
“In the blue zones, you eat food without contents labels on the packaging, i.e. natural, unprocessed food. What you see is what you get, and nothing else!”
I was planning to make a lovely homemade granola for a special occasion. To make it even tastier, I was going to get some dried blueberries and add them in. I always look at the contents if it’s not something I normally buy. When I went to buy my dried blueberries, classed as a healthy food, I was a little hasty and assumed that there wouldn’t be any additives. Once at the check-out, I happened to catch sight of the contents label, which listed various ingredients. One of these was gluctose-fructose syrup: this consists of various types of chemically-produced sugars that raise your blood sugar level more rapidly than white sugar. I do sometimes eat foods that contain different types of sugar, but this is normally a conscious decision to eat something I enjoy. However, I’d rather not buy food believing it’s made as naturally as possible, and in this case paying a little extra, only for it then to contain substances that I try to consume very moderately. Unfortunately, this is a very common trap to fall into, but it can be easily avoided if we’re a little more observant.
By skimming through the contents, you can avoid unnecessary ingredients and make smarter decisions. Think about how much can be put into a product without us noticing. There are often better alternatives to choose from. When we read the contents label, it’s useful to look first at what the product contains most of in terms of weight, and then what it contains less of. For instance, if you want to see if a product contains added sugar, this might be listed in parentheses when one of the ingredients in the product has sugar as an additive. An example of this is when products contain dried fruit such as muesli. Whilst this might sound healthy, it can actually be that the fruit is coated in sugar and therefore contains a relatively high amount. Dried fruit also contains a naturally more concentrated amount of sugar, and so the total sugar content can really add up. If the contents list is very long or contains many strange names that you can’t understand or pronounce, you might want to think twice about buying the product. Whilst it’s best to eat as much natural, unprocessed food as possible, in our everyday time-poor lives, it’s smarter to find semi-processed products that contain as few unnecessary additives as possible. There are often plenty of good alternatives.
“Remember that if you really like something that contains a lot of additives, it’s fine to eat it once in a while. What matters then is how often and how much you eat it.”
My advice:
Generally speaking, make sure you skim through the contents list when you don’t know the ingredients of something you’re buying. A ground rule can be that what you eat should be for the most part unprocessed food. In this way you can make wiser choices, and supplement with semi-processed products that contain as few additives as possible.
